You Can Go Home Again
Andrew Mason
Sunday July 2, 2000
In the fourth quarter of Saturday night’s game at the Ice Palace between the Tampa Bay Storm and the Orlando Predators, I reached such a moment – one where the heart overruled the mind, where passion trumped logic.
It was one that came after a day of doubt – of wondering how I’d feel to be back at a place I hadn’t visited in over 13 months, of pondering how I’d react to seeing a team that I pulled passionately for in bygone high school days, but had since disowned.
I didn’t know whether I’d see those familiar gold helmets and blue jerseys of the Storm and feel the pull of loyalty to a club whose first game I attended on June 1, 1991, or feel the sting of rejection after a painful – and, to be honest, overly ugly – end to something I’d enjoyed for eight consecutive summers.
Granted, I’d grown up quite a bit in my year-plus sentence in purgatory away from the Palace. After all, at the time I attended my last Storm game and left metaphorically kicking and screaming, I had the unfettered hubris any 22-year-old possesses; I thought I knew all about everything.
But making two cross-country moves in one year and meeting people with more experience, more wisdom and more wariness permanently changed that presumption. Not that I thought I’d root for the Storm again; honestly, I didn’t think I could bring myself to do that, not as stubborn as I tend to be.
Saturday night, my resistance to this team weakened. It’s easy to see why.
Saturday’s game – the latest edition of the “War on I-4” – was everything that this sport aspires to be. It possessed the white-hot flames of intense rivalry fanned by geographic proximity and sustained excellence over the course of a decade, yet was not marred by the brawls and donnybrooks that can be an unfortunate byproduct of the most intense athletic competition.
It was an evening of heroism on both sides. A leaping, falling backwards touchdown catch by Storm lineman Mel Agee. A quarterback in Orlando’s Connell Maynor who remained in the game through injury and falling to the turf on seemingly every snap in the final quarter, who suffered one fumble simply because he couldn’t stop fighting for an extra yard. Another quarterback, Tampa Bay’s John Kaleo, who called his own number on a two-point conversion, bootlegging his way over the goal line for the score.
The game was tied at halftime, 20-20. It went down to the final seconds, with Orlando possessing a chance to win in the final moments. And as the on-field drama heightened, it was surrounded by the kind of atmosphere the Storm hasn’t seen since moving across Tampa Bay from the then-ThunderDome, as a boisterous, cacophonous crowd of 14,047 cajoled, cried and celebrated at jet aircraft volume for the entire evening.
It was not the environment I remembered from the last two years. It was the milieu I fondly recalled from the halcyon early-1990s days when I fell in love with both the Storm and the game of Arena Football itself. It was an evening that possessed a magic in the air that the league should want to bottle up and spread around all the franchises in the AFL and AF2, for it would guarantee that any fans sitting on the fence waiting to judge this sport would make the leap from casual followers to die-hard fans.
It was everything this game should be. A football field surrounded by a deafening crowd -- frenzied not by the artificial esteem boost induced by alcohol, but by the events inside the walls – and a taut, back-and-forth tussle between two evenly matched teams treating each snap as if death was the consequence of failure.
It was in these surroundings that I realized I was wrong about myself. In the fourth quarter, I turned to two friends and told them each the same thing.
”I never thought this would happen,” I said, “but I’m pulling for the Storm.”
Maybe it was the indefatigable heart coming to the fore. Maybe it was realizing that while I may have been right about some things, I may have been wrong in the way I went about them.
But now, when I look at the Storm, I no longer see the team with which I endured a public dispute. I see the team I watched and cheered for from its birth, playing a game that refuses to let go of my heart.
Andrew Mason was at the Tampa Bay Storm`s first home game on June 1, 1991 and has followed the game ever since. While in college, he served as content editor and co-founder of The Storm Shelter, a Web site which covered the Tampa Bay Storm on the Internet from 1996-99. He also volunteered with the team`s media relations department in 1998 and currently contributes to ColoradoCrush.com. He's covered the NFL for various on-line outlets since 1999.